Language Play Research Articles

Mythologizing of Ukrainian Drama during the Soviet Era (1920s) as a Way of Theatre Institutionalising

The purpose of the work is to reveal the peculiarities of the Ukrainian drama mythologizing at the beginning of the Soviet era (1920s). The research methodology consists in the application of a number of methods: analytical to understand the literature on the topic of the article; interdisciplinary – to comprehensively study factual material and acquire new knowledge; systematic with the use of a range of methods (biographical, semiotic, cultural, hermeneutic, historical, and theoretical generalisation) – to comprehend the stated purpose of the research. Scientific novelty. For the first time, the interrelationship of mythologizing and the development of Ukrainian drama as a means of theatre institutionalising in the beginning of the Soviet era is systematically studied. Conclusions. The publication proves the statement: A myth in the theatrical sphere can be any message in the language of drama due to the fact that the myth itself has no substantial boundaries. This is directly related to the fact that the myth is a phenomenon embedded in the primary sign system, that is, in the natural language of the theatre. The characteristics of a myth in drama include intentionality, naturalisation, aggressiveness, formality, and historicity. Myth in the theatrical sphere has an imperative, motivating character. It imposes its own aggressive, motivatingambiguity. A theatrical myth and symbol of the Soviet government, nurtured in Ukraine in the 20s of the 20th century, enabled the creation of a unique theatrical organism that made art popular (in a positive sense). It can be argued that the striving for the ideal created by the new government, on the one hand, and its discrediting, on the other hand, became the tendencies, the collision of which created the phenomenon of the «Ukrainian Soviet theatre». In general, the logic of mythologizing theatrical life was connected with a number of key interrelationships: myth – transformation of meaning into form – replacement of language with myth. Key words: theatre, myth, mythologizing, manipulation, ideology, Soviet regime.

Language Play and Linguistic and Cognitive Modeling of Reality – Real and Imagined (as Exemplified in Carroll L. «Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There»)

The problem of linguistic description of a literary text, where the main place is given to play techniques, is relevant and of keen interest. The effect of playing with words, as a special form of linguistic creativity, creates a sense of intellectual obstacle, the overcoming of which gives great pleasure. Language play is not only an opportunity to realize linguistic meanings, but also a form of comprehension and cognition of the world. The study of the linguistic and cognitive mechanism, modeling reality, is promising in terms of the study of linguistic means, determining communicative situations. The aim of the article is to identify and comprehensively analyze the linguistic means involved in modeling real and imagined reality. The material of the research is examples of wordplay of L. Carroll's work fragment. Basic methods of research are analysis, synthesis, method of linguistic description. The methods of observation, contextual and stylistic analysis revealed the types of language play that give a special expressiveness, comic effect, created consciously and paradoxically. Using the system-descriptive method, the method of lexico-semantic analysis, the author identified linguistic means of reality modeling: verbs of orientation in space, verbs of cognition, intellectual activity, modal verbs expressing emotional state; comparative constructions, idioms, containing basic axiomatics of language consciousness, leading to ambiguity with simultaneous realization of literal and figurative meanings. Semantic analysis of phrasal verbs with post-verbs showed the results of their meanings reinterpretation in the context of communicative situations. Within the framework of polysemy a choice of meanings associated with the parameters of a given situation is provided. A special role is played by metaphors, in which the play of words is enclosed. They create new meanings from fragments of subjective experience. In conclusion, it is assumed that when new meanings are generated as a result of semantic anomalies or paradoxes, the identified linguistic means, describing the real and imagined reality, set the parameters of the situation, and can be considered as codes, extracting the underlying meanings and differentiating communicative situations.

The Role of Language Game in German Political Discourse (on Case of “Political Ash Wednesday”)

Introduction. The article is devoted to the role of the language game in the communication strategies used by German politicians within the framework of the “political Ash Wednesday” (on the example of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria, 2018, 2019 and 2020). The purpose of the study was to determine the communicative strategies for which the CSU politicians use the language game in their speeches on the “political Ash Wednesday”. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that this genre of German political discourse has practically not been studied either from the point of view of political science or from the point of view of political linguistics, despite the fact that it has an already established tradition. The relevance of the work is due to the need to close this gap in the study of political discourse in Germany and at least partially describe this genre.Methodology and sources. To study the phenomenon of language play, a field method was used, in which the authors of the article analyzed the political situation in Germany in 20172019, and also described communicative strategies and tactics. By the method of continuous sampling from the texts of the speeches of the leaders of the CS (M. Zeider, M. Blume, A. Scheer, M. Weber), cases of language play were selected, classified by language levels and analyzed in context.Results and discussion. It was found that the language game serves to implement various communicative strategies: discrediting and self-praise strategies, manipulative and formation of an emotional mood strategies, self-defense and agitation strategies. Since on the “Political Ash Wednesday” the main speakers’ intentions are to preserve the image of their party and disrupt the image of competing parties, in the politicians’ speeches the language game was most often used as part of the discrediting strategy (ridiculing opponents, made them look bad) and self-praise (emphasizing the positive qualities members of the same party or the successes achieved by the CSU).Conclusion. The use of language games during performances allows operators to influence the mass addressee by creating the necessary emotional background. The techniques of the language game determine the implementation of communicative strategies and tactics aimed at maintaining one's own image and diminishing the influence of opponents. An important factor for understanding the techniques of the language game is knowledge of the cultural background and the realities of the country.

ONTOLOGICAL SYSTEM OF BARDAISAN – FREE WILL AND “ETHICAL COSMOLOGY”

The article is devoted to the reconstruction of the ontological system of Bardaisan. A specific view of ethics as an ontological construct is characteristic of the Middle Eastern philosophical tradition. The teachings of Bardaisan lie at the origins of the Syrian religious philosophy, therefore the reconstruction of his teachings allows us to understand the main sources that formed the Eastern philosophical tradition in its originality. A detailed philosophical analysis of the concept of fate in the teachings of Bardaisan has not previously been undertaken. In addition, most of the studies paid more attention to the history of borrowings and the origin of various concepts of the Bardaisanite philosophy and their doxography, while the analysis of individual concepts was usually left out of brackets. The study of Bardaisan as a philosopher from the point of view of the modern philosophical tradition is undertaken for the first time. The article pays great attention to the phenomenon of free will, the construct underlying Bardaisan's “ethical cosmology”. The transformation of Babylonian astrology and Jewish symbolism serves as a civilizational backdrop against which Bardaisan weaves Christian ethics, Zoroastrian ontology, and Stoic anthropology. Understanding the peculiarities of citing Greek philosophy, as well as building the main ontological constructs, provides the key to understanding the Middle Eastern philosophical tradition. The dialogue "Book of Laws and Countries", which is considered in the article, is a vivid example of a treatise-mesekhet, a multilevel discourse, the space of a language game, images and tropes. The article examines models of interaction of various discourses and various strategies for building a philosophical treatise. Plato's dialogue, using Middle Eastern metaphor, reveals the space of language play and intertextuality, dissemination.

Language play techniques in mass media

The article analyzes graphic occasionalisms created through the graphic instruments of language play. The material for the study includes the new formations taken from the texts of the modern Russian-language publicistic discourse. The studied material shows that capitalization as one of the techniques of graphic language play is widely represented in the texts of mass media. The novelty of the study lies in the fact that, unlike other works, it examines modern graphic occasionalisms formed through the combination of capitalization and other methods of graphic play: polycodification, reduplication, holophrasis, and the techniques associated with the division of the usual word in different ways. The practical material allows for the analysis of the linguistic situation of the present period of time.

Trump bots and algorithmic experimentation on Twitter

Although media headlines about Twitterbots often revolve around their malicious uses (e.g., inflating follower counts, pushing polarizing messages, confusing users), many bots add value to the platform by contributing informational or creative content. Bot creators have used the relatively open Twitter API to experiment with automation, and over the past five years, a growing number of accounts, dubbed here the Trump bots, have filled Twitter with Donald Trump’s own words filtered through the many possible concepts of a Twitterbot. This study considers the breadth of Twitterbots created around Trump’s Twitter persona through a qualitative categorization of 59 Trump bots, examining how these projects match many of the major threads of algorithmic experimentation used by the Twitterbot maker community at large. Three major functions of Trump bots — language play, information distribution, and direct criticism — are identified and explored through relevant exemplars.

Language for Specific Purposes in academia vs. Labor Market Needs: the Trends and Perspectives in Montenegro

The present paper outlines the key findings of a study that was carried out in Montenegro with the aim of getting an overview of the current state of play in language for specific purposes teaching and the actual needs from the perspective of students, university staff members (both academic and nonacademic) and employers. To this end, an online survey was designed and distributed among the target groups with an overall total of 1,985 participants. Furthermore, an online English placement test was conducted among the first year students at Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Montenegro with an overall number of 853 respondents, in order to compare the language proficiency entrance levels to the curriculum expectations. The results suggest the high level of need for LSP proficiency, both for academic and occupational purposes, the general dissatisfaction with the English language proficiency level of the prospective employees that apply for job posts, the need to master an additional foreign language apart from English and the need to enhance the policy of LSP teaching at HEIs in Montenegro, which are seen by employers as a key partner in terms of quality control and assurance in language teaching. The paper concludes with recommendations for LSP teaching and planning at HEIs in Montenegro.

HUMOR EXPRESSION IN SARAH SECHAN TALKSHOW

Humor has a crucial function in talk show because talk show without humor can be flat and boring. Therefore, it is important to investigate types of humor which are occurred in talk show, especially by audience. The focus of this paper is to explore the humor expressions and its function used by host and guest in Sarah Sechan talk show. This study focused on Sarah Sechan talk show in Obrolan Seru Sarah Sechan Bersama Pak Ahok episode which employed the host and guest. To collect data, the researcher downloaded the video from internet with duration one hour and nine minutes. The video of this talk show was obtained, transcribed, and analyzed by using discourse analysis approach. The humor expression used by the host and guest were discussed based on the types of humor of Norrick (1993) and the functions of those humors were analyzed based on Meyer (2000). Findings show that host and guest employed various humors during the talk show. Their humor expression can be as irony, teasing, banter, language play, and joking. In addition, the functions of humors which appear in Sarah Sechan talk show are identification, clarification, enforcement, and differentiation. Findings of this study are relevant in the development of Sarah Sechan talk show particularly to be more creative and interesting talk show for audience.

“NoL, please be away from my life.” - Pejorative neologisms for stigmatizing males in Chinese micro-blogging

This study investigates the use of an emergent pejorative “蝻” nǎn by Chinese micro-blogging users on Weibo. The phonetic part “南” nán (south) of “蝻” (nymph of locust - NoL) is a homophone of “男” (male) in Chinese with a dehumanized quality; hence “蝻” was often used to devalue males, thereby churning out various associated neologisms in cyberspace. Data were collected from 898 unique Weibo postings included “蝻”. The focal neologisms were coded according to six identified linguistic structures, including “蝻” associated with identity pejoration, adjectives, affective terms, taboo terms, feminine gender markers and others. Underneath its superficial pejoration, we argue that “蝻” can be adopted as contextual strategies to counter gender issues via the above-mentioned language play, projecting a shifting gender ideology in China’s cyberspace.

캐나다 동시와 캐나다 정체성

This paper starts with questions concerning the paucity of Canadian children’s poetry even after the British North American Act went into effect in 1867. Against the weak background of Canadian poetry for children up to the 1960s, this study discusses the significance of Dennis Lee’s theory and poetry, which had an impact on fostering Canadian national identity and the freedom of imagination. Criticizing Canada’s colonial position and its inward colonization, Lee explores the authenticity of Canadian writing, which has roots in the “here and now.” He senses cadence as presence, and actively employs sound, nursery rhymes, Canadian settings and home-grown domestic details. Alligator Pie (1974) and Nicholas Knock and Other People (1974) are “complementary” books of poems; in the former for younger children, linguistic games with child-like playfulness convey Canadian culture and sensibilities, and in the latter for older children, “the liberation of repressed energies” is involved. Lee’s word play and nonsensical use of language provide the early childhood with a knowledge of Canadian identity and the liberating power of imagination.

Champlain Towers South Collapse: Frequency, Governance and Liability Issues

The tragedy of the sudden collapse of the 2021 Champlain Towers condominium building in Surfside, Florida raises issues of civil liability and throws into doubt the sustainability of the current model of condominium association governance. This case study evaluates the potential causes of the collapse, and reactions of various parties including the consulting engineering company, city regulators, condominium association board, outside property manager, original builder, and unit owners themselves. By conducting a comprehensive literature review, this paper is aimed to find out the reasons, frequency and liability of building collapse, as well as the roles condominium governance, financial modeling, poverty, or statutory language play in the tragedy. Some advice for further improvements to improve board sustainability is given to original developers, contractors, engineers, and insurance carriers. The current model of condominium management has blind spots and appears to be unsustainable. One suggestion to fix the problem is to require that insurance be obtained to insure the liability of condominium associations, including for this type of tragedy. That would create a financial risk/incentive for the insurance company to ensure adequate management and upkeep. The insurance company should also set board member expertise qualifications, insurance premiums, need for outside expertise, required inspections/maintenance, and replacement reserves that are required to maintain that coverage.

How to Enhance Language Awareness of Beginners Using the American TV Comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine

The purpose of this paper is twofold: (1) to examine whether beginning level students improve language awareness through language play and (2) to investigate whether they can receptively find language play in movie discourse. For this, two beginning level college students joined in a case study. The media material was episode 1 from season 1 of the 2013 American comedy television series, Brooklyn Nine-Nine (Lord & Miller, 2013). In this study, three stages were administered. In the first stage, the participants chose whatever they preferred in the drama without any instruction. In the second stage, they were instructed briefly through discourse analysis. In the third stage, the teacher gave discourse analysis-oriented instruction in which the participants learned pragmatic and contextual meaning, and they matched those meanings with linguistic expressions. The results indicated that the participants showed only small improvements in awareness of linguistic items in the first stage. During the second stage, after they were instructed about language play, their discovery of linguistic items showed a small increase. Lastly, in the third stage, the results revealed learners became stronger in explaining sequences of linguistic items even though grammatical meanings were mentioned only once. Meaning in this case study turned out to be essential.

ПРИЙОМИ СТВОРЕННЯ КОМІЧНОГО ЕФЕКТУ В КРЕОЛІЗОВАНИХ ТЕКСТАХ АНГЛОМОВНИХ АНІМАЦІЙНИХ КОМЕДІЙ НА ОСНОВІ ВЗАЄМОДІЇ ВЕРБАЛЬНИХ ТА НЕВЕРБАЛЬНИХ ЗАСОБІВ

The article reflects the results of the research of methods and means of achieving the comic effect in semiotically heterogeneous texts of English-speaking animated comedies. In addition to language play, which is provided by the arsenal of multilevel linguistic and stylistic means and covers all layers of the text, it is natural that in texts of this type an important role in achieving comic effect belongs to nonverbal means in interaction with verbal. It is revealed that the comic effect is achieved as a result of an artificially created contradiction between the content of the verbal and visual components; inconsistency between visual and verbal data, in other words, the inclusion of the verbal component in the opposite content of the the non-verbal context; unfulfilled expectations that arise in the viewer after the verbal or visual message; assimilation of the meaning of verbal signs to visual signs.

МОВНІ ОСОБЛИВОСТІ АМЕРИКАНСЬКОГО ТА УКРАЇНСЬКОГО СТУДЕНТСЬКОГО СЛЕНГУ

The article analyzes specific features of the use and functioning of youth slang in the United States and Ukraine. The origin of the concept of “slang” is covered, its types, semantic and functional characteristics of slang units, identification of semantic differences between slang and other layers of narrow vocabulary, features of their categories are named and slang terms in different areas are studied. Slang – which is below the standard; these words do not use the standard language or they have their own meaning. Slang words and expressions are emotional and often used as metaphors. Slang is a word, a vocabulary that changes very quickly. If a word is found to lose its novelty, it is replaced by new slang. This is a person’s vocabulary. Slang is characterized by the fact that it is always updated. Youth slang is characterized by liveliness, flexibility and unexpected wit. Slang is a constant formation of words that uses the principle of language play. It has been studied that slang is popular among young people. Young people live slang in everyday life because they strive to be modern and stylish. Many people use slang, any other means of communication.

TRANSLATION AS TRANSFORMATION: ON THE TREATMENT OF PUNS AND WORDPLAY IN ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF JINPINGMEI

The novel Jinpingmei is rife with various forms of language play, which produces special stylistic or poetic effects and contributes to characterization. Language play in Jinpingmei gives rise to cognitive effects on the reader and poses a serious challenge to interlingual translation. However, it has hitherto received little attention from translation studies researchers. The issue of how different forms of language play are treated in English translations of Jinpingmei has not been touched upon. This article aims to fill the gap by analyzing and discussing the translation of puns and wordplay in Jinpingmei. It takes a cognitive-pragmatic view and draws upon a relevance-theoretic approach to examine the way in which puns and wordplay is rendered into the target language. Within the relevance-theoretic framework, translation is viewed as an “interpretive use of language” and the relation between source and target texts is based on interpretive resemblance rather than equivalence (Sperber & Wilson, 1986; Gutt, 1991). The analysis undertaken in the article is based on two English translations of Jinpingmei. Following Delabastita’s (1996) taxonomy of puns and transferring strategies, the article examines the translators’ translation strategies and assesses the degree of relevance and interpretive resemblance achieved in the two translations vis-à-vis the source text. Research results demonstrate that most puns and wordplay are lost or misconstrued in translation and that the translators exhibit different patterns in their approaches to translating wordplay in Jinpingmei. Moreover, the degree of interpretive resemblance achieved in the two translations differs significantly. The article concludes that the translators’ choice is influenced by translational skopos, the sociocultural context of translation and reception, and the (un)translatability of wordplay effected by the linguistic and cultural difference between Chinese and English.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0935/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Imagining Incarnation

What role can the imagination and literary language play in understanding ‘the sacred’, specifically theologies of incarnation? Australian novelist Patrick White’s Voss is read, in this article, as a testing ground for the ways in which human imagination can nurture incarnational longings and beliefs; but also for registering the limits of human language confronting what can be experienced semper processus. That is, this article argues that knowledge of sacredness and the incarnational, diversely intuited in many different forms and practices—Indigenous, European, Romantic, and in the land—can be approached in literary works, but that grasping a key expression of the sacred, incarnation, will always be an agonistic, stumbling, partial human process. The figure of Voss, lonely, self-absorbed, foreign, driven by will, intends to map the country, but this novel unravels human arrogance, undoing all its characters as they reach in their own ways towards incarnational truths.

‘Instafashion’, ‘adeventures’ and ‘gals on the go’: The creative use of English in Greek fashion magazines

AbstractThis paper examines the use of English in Greek fashion magazines. It assesses the frequency of the use of English in these media, uncovers its discourse forms and functions, and illustrates why English is being used in the first place. As it is shown, English mainly takes the form of naming and headings and what characterizes its use is creativity and innovation. Through language play, intertextual references, clips, deliberate spelling mistakes, and alternations of the intended meaning of idiomatic phrases, English has a variety of functions such as creating emphasis and attracting the reader’s attention. Like other settings where English bears a non-official status, the use of English features capitalizes on the symbolic and indexical value of this language. English is used because it symbolizes progression, innovation, and success and because it indexes knowledge of and association with globalized fashion and beauty discourses and styles circulating worldwide in fashion magazines, on social networking sites, and platforms. The findings of this study can be used to examine the extent of the homogenization of the fashion discourse worldwide while similar studies can be conducted with different types of media to compare the way that English is used in a variety of contexts in Greece and elsewhere.

From hǎo to hǒu – stylising online communication with Chinese dialects

ABSTRACT Although a growing body of literature has explored multilingual users’ digital practice, dialects adoptions have received relatively little attention. As an important part of the Chinese language, spoken dialects, or ‘方言’ (fangyan), are highly complex in their classification and colloquial usage. Nevertheless, Chinese online users, especially those of younger generations, find ways to incorporate dialects in stylised online expressions for language play. This study explores the strategic adoptions of dialects by investigating stylised dialectal expressions through a leading video-sharing website in China, bilibili.com. By identifying representative Chinese dialectal phrases and phonetic features, the authors coded a total of 1779 instances of dialect-stylised expressions from 159 videos on bilibili.com. Further investigation and analysis reveal that the sampled expressions largely reflect the dialectal features found in Northeastern Guanhua, Cantonese, Southwestern Guanhua and Min, representing an overarching representation of some of the large dialectal groups in Chinese Mainland. In addition, various linguistic strategies, such as phonetic transliteration and Romanised letters, were used to facilitate and stylise the digital representations of these spoken dialects. The findings exhibit Bilibili users’ flexible choices of multilingual resources for dialect stylisation.

Typology of English–Korean code ambiguation

Bilingual code ambiguation (CA), also known as language play or punning, has been discussed for bilingual creativity as it requires English users to manipulate two languages in a single utterance (Moody & Matsumoto, 2003). Since Moody and Matsumoto (2003) suggested English–Japanese CA in the lyrics of Japanese popular (J-pop) music, some studies have paid attention to diverse aspects of bilingual creativity performed in this complex linguistic phenomenon (Luk, 2013; Rivlina, 2015; Scherling, 2016). They have reported non-native English users’ control over linguistic knowledge in phonological analogy (Moody & Matsumoto, 2003; Scherling, 2016), semantic relatedness and blending (Luk, 2013; Moody & Matsumoto, 2003), and socio-pragmatic functions (Luk, 2013; Rivlina, 2015). They have further suggested that CA needs to be viewed as bilinguals’ performative use of English and a local language to achieve symbolic goals (Moody & Matsumoto, 2003; Scherling, 2016).

In defense of ordinary language philosophy

What role does ordinary language play in philosophical theorizing today? One might think: little. After all, analytic philosophy has moved past its “ordinary language” phase; in metaphysics, for example, few would think that attending to “time” and related words has anything to teach us about the nature of, and how we persist through, time. The aim of this paper, however, is to argue that contemporary analytic philosophy pays more attention to ordinary language use than the implicit historiography mentioned above suggests. Moreover, and moving from description to evaluation, the paper argues that this is philosophically defensible. In many areas of philosophy, to learn about a phenomenon weought to pay at least some attention to how ordinary language users speak about it.